Will nanowire technology change the world?
A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
And nanowires are invisibly small wires less than 100 nanometers wide. Nanowires might someday enable your computer to have 100 times more memory than it does now. Stuart Parkin is an experimental physicist at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He’s invented a memory device using nanowires.
Stuart Parkin: My goal, my job, is to try to think of new ways of taking new science, new physics, new materials and to try create new types of prototype devices that are radically superior to anything that could be imagined.
In this case, Parkin has invented a new way to store information on computers, what he calls “racetrack memory.” The advantages of the racetrack memory, he said, is that it can store enormous quantities of data, which you can access very quickly. His invention places tiny nanowires upright on a silicon chip, like a tree.
Stuart Parkin: Yes, that’s right, we’re going to store information in the trunk of that tree. And we’re going to run the information up and down, if you like, the tree trunk.
Parkin emphasized that there are still problems to be worked out. But he said his racetrack memory should help make computer memory cheaper, and make computers faster, smaller and more reliable.
Thanks today to the National Science Foundation.
